A eulogy from Steve Jobs' sister and his final words

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A eulogy from Steve Jobs’ sister and his final words

Before the “Holy fuck Steve Jobs oh noes” stuff starts, this public eulogy to her brother by Mona Simpson is pretty incredible stuff. She didn’t meet Steve until she was 25, but here she pours her heart out on the most important man in her life, how he struggled for years trying to beat cancer and ultimately… not failed, but achieved death in his own way.

I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.

Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.

“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.

He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.

I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.

Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.

One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.

I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.

He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.

By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.

And Steve Jobs’ last words? “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.” It reminds me of when I watched my grandfather’s last moments as he was dying also from pancreatic cancer, and after he told me “You’re a good person, don’t let anyone tell you you’re not”, he peered into the corner of his bedroom, where hours earlier he had looked, saying with whatever breath he could muster “No, go away, I’m not ready yet” and this time he just said “Okay.” And he was gone.

Read the rest here